Idea for V3: Model government corruption and incompetence

Hardcore_gamer said:

One of the most unrealistic aspects of many strategy games Victoria 2 included, is that it fails it factor in the fact that many governments and leaders don't actually care about the welfare of their nation and just work for their own gain. This means that unlike the real world, in V2 every country is always trying to do only what is the best for itself. What I want in V3, is some system that makes it so that some governments basically just become glorified gangsters that run their nations into the ground either because of their attempts to horde all the wealth to them self's or because of mere incompetence. This would make more sense realism wise than every nation always being controlled by only people trying to work for their nation's welfare.

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If you want to create a historical nation building simulator than sure, implement that. Otherwise forcing players to run their nations poorly because they are supposed to mimic some dictator is just bad. Incorporating corruption is never going to be realistic in a computer game anyhow, for example in the Civilization and Total War series of games corruption is just another income penalty, much like a tax that you pay rather than gain. Is that realistic? No, the money doesn't just vanish, it's actually being used so someone is profiting from it. Whether it's a foreign school the corrupt kings send their children to, the captains that sail their extravagant cruise ships, etc. So in Vicky's terms some of your population, those close to you- the dictator, are benefiting from all this money that you're spending. So unless you want to incorporate a complex mechanism of what the dictator actually does with the money, having no corruption at all is just as realistic as having corruption as a negative tax.

The AI is already incompetent, so you can't say that all countries are always trying to do what's best for their citizens. Bankruptcy, failed wars, revolutions happen often enough.
For a player nation,I'm not sure that it's always run for its citizens. Just consider the number of wars and great wars that are fought and engineered by a player and you'll get a nation that most people would not want to live in. Corruption is already in through admin efficiency (you pay more for forts, units etc when you have low admin) but it's a bit too easy to get to 100% admin

Hardcore_gamer said:

There is a difference between AI incompetence and intended programed incompetence. I want some kind of system where each new government is given some kind of random stats that affect it's behaviour. Think about it being like the stats an individual from CK2 gets, that affect that person's character and behaviour, while also giving it penalties or bonuses. It would be awesome having a similar system for governments in Victoria 3, because besides making the game more realistic it would also mean that individual countries would have actual character instead of just being bland generic nation number 10 thousand.

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This has nothing to do with your corruption suggestion and is already somewhat implemented. A good case study is AI France, sometimes it is very militaristic, other times it's very economical, not exactly sure what determines which direction France will take, but the difference is substantial. In other nations it's not as noticeable but I suspect it's still there.

Er, don't people already play like this? Max industry score, public subsidizes on factories, sending millions of citizens to war, low taxes on the rich, etc etc?

It seems to me the richer the country, the better off the rich/politicians are.

Though, I agree with El Jojo, administration efficiency should be really hard to raise. That, I think, is the key indicator of "corruptness" of a country: not it's politicians, but it's bureaucracy.

Hardcore_gamer said:

There is a difference between AI incompetence and intended programed incompetence. I want some kind of system where each new government is given some kind of random stats that affect it's behaviour. Think about it being like the stats an individual from CK2 gets, that affect that person's character and behaviour, while also giving it penalties or bonuses. It would be awesome having a similar system for governments in Victoria 3, because besides making the game more realistic it would also mean that individual countries would have actual character instead of just being bland generic nation number 10 thousand.

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I think we're not speaking about the same thing, incompetence and corruption, in my opinion, are more systemic problems and not something that changes with every government. In fact, even the best government is often unable to confront widespread corruption, at least not quickly.
I think PoD has something like that, at every election you get a bonus/malus depending associated with the new prime minister / president.

The other solution is HoI-like where you control your cabinet and can appoint ministers from a portfolio depending on your party in power, so sometimes you have only bad choices to choose from. It would require a huge work to make it work on a whole century though, but i could be random generated and then used as the general system (but with much less choice).

Hardcore_gamer said:

You make a good point there. I agree that its very often the bureacracy rather than the actual state that may often be responsible for the problems. I don't think the current admin system really deals with the problem of corruption because according to current game mechanics admin can be increased simply by making the number of BC larger. It would be nice seeing a much detailed system that makes it more of a challenge to deal with corrupt and/or bloated bureacracy.

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That I would like to see.

Hardcore_gamer said:

What I want in V3, is some system that makes it so that some governments basically just become glorified gangsters that run their nations into the ground either because of their attempts to horde all the wealth to them self's or because of mere incompetence.

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The latter aspect is already in V2 - the human player is responsible for making government's decision thus providing suitable representation of human incompetence As far as AI nations go, no special effort is required to make their government incompetent

I would like to see admin being hard to maintain and that even with full spending this can sometimes lead to more problems as the bureaucracy starts to form its' own empire within an empire.

As an industrialising nation you just need full spending and admin hits 100%, no need for the focus.

I would also like to know the candidates for each party, perhaps even some nomination shenanigans.

Sounds like an awful idea